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hermit

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈhɜːmɪt//
  • United States//ˈhɝmɪt//

A religious recluse; someone who lives alone for religious reasons; an eremite.

noun

  1. 1

    A religious recluse; someone who lives alone for religious reasons; an eremite.

  2. 2

    A recluse; someone who lives alone and shuns human companionship.

    Solitary the thrush, / The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, / Sings by himself a song.

    Millie told him he sounded like some batty hermit who lived in a cave.

  3. 3

    A spiced cookie made with molasses, raisins, and nuts.

  4. 4

    A hermit crab.

    Because hermits are decapods and do not live within their own shells, they are not considered to be true crabs.

  5. 5

    Any in the subfamily Phaethornithinae of hummingbirds.

Etymology

From Middle English hermite, heremite, eremite, from Old French eremite, from Ecclesiastical Latin, Late Latin eremita, from Ancient Greek ἐρημίτης (erēmítēs, “person of the desert”) from ἐρημία (erēmía, “desert, solitude”), from ἔρημος (érēmos) or ἐρῆμος (erêmos, “uninhabited”) plus -ίτης (-ítēs, “one connected to, a member of”). Doublet of eremite. Displaced native Old English ānsetla.

Forms

plural
hermits
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).